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Talk:Beauty and the Beast/@comment-108.39.98.157-20171007221028
2. Belle, from Beauty & the Beast. I was so, so, SO tempted to put Belle as my favorite Disney Heroine. She is, without a shadow of a doubt, my favorite Disney Princess. Like Cinderella, Tiana, and arguably Rapunzel and Aurora before her (though, in the case of those last two, it’s a little more complicated), Belle’s story is one of rags-to-riches. But she’s a different sort of Disney Princess. Belle starts off, in many ways, a flawed character. Not a BAD character, mind you; she’s never an unlikeable figure. In fact, in many ways, she’s admirable! In her hometown in France, she’s something of the town oddball; the most beautiful girl in the village, and also the most outcast. Almost everyone sees her as some sort of prize to be won, or else suspects her of some strangeness, or simply dismisses her as weird. She doesn’t care. She just goes about her daily routine, minding her own business, and being courteous and kind to everyone. It’s Belle’s independence and cleverness that makes her so outcast, too, which makes the townsfolk truly seem odd in comparison. What Belle really wants is also sort of unclear, yet also more particular than other characters: she’s not specifically out for love, or for glory, or to prove her worth. She’s out seeking...just…“more.” She calls it “adventure in the great, wide somewhere,” at one point, but I don’t think adventure is what she’s really seeking. It’s something much more metaphysical; something new and fresh and exciting and beyond the small mindset of the society around her. It’s not that she hates her little town, or anybody specifically in it, it’s just that she feels there more to life than the day-to-day activities found there. It helps that, in the end, she finds what she’s seeking in the last place she’d ever expect. She’s a romantic, to be fair, yet also very practical and clever. For someone so beautiful, she never shows off, and it’s clear to us that looks, for her, are far from everything. She comes to love the Beast because she sees what a gentle heart he truly has, and how he really just needs someone to help him learn how to care for others; she comes to loathe Gaston because he’s a selfish, misogynistic, two-faced cad with no regards to life of any sort. She fights through things, but in a different way than other princesses; many princesses have to learn. Belle has to both learn AND teach, helping the Beast just as much as he ends up helping her. She’s strong, she’s smart, she’s kind but not to a fault, and she has to learn to love the Beast just as he must learn to love her. It’s hard to create a story and character that dependent on another character and still make them interesting and fun, but the film manages perfectly. But while Belle is my favorite Disney Princess, she is not my favorite Disney Heroine. That dubious honor goes to...